Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

Setanta wrote:

The entire cozy little "war on terror" package with which the Shrub and Company hoped to cover a multitude of evils certain was a scare tactic.

BS..pure and simple...The war on terror was in direct response to these actions from muslim extremists and the CIA's mistaken belief that Hussein was hiding wmd and willing to provide the same to these extremists. The war had nothing to do with diverting attention from some "multitude of evils" you've dreamed up.

Thank you very much, but I'll stick with the facts.

Cyclo,
I guess you can believe whatever off the wall scenario you want to believe, but "the official line" will go down in the history books as the truth.

You have nothing but innuendo and a few statements taken out of context to prove your point. Thank you very much, but I'll stick with the facts.

My guess is history books will forward a quite different plot.

"Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Set,
Your rant is more paranoid than usual. The Iraq war was and is part of the war on terror just as is Afghanistan. Now I'll give you that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks and I've not insinuated that they did. However, there is no dispute that Bin Laden overtured Iraq on several occassions and that Hussein made similar overtures of assistance and asylum to Bin Laden. The fact that they never established a collaborative relationship is beside the point.

pg 61 - "Bin Laden was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq..." and "...Bin Laden himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum...Bin Laden is said to have asked for space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons..."

Pg 66 - "There is also evidence that around this time Bin Laden sent out a number of feelers to the Iraqi regime, offering some cooperation...In mid-1998,the situation reversed;it was Iraq that reportedly took the initiative.In March 1998,after Bin Ladin’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged through Bin Ladin’s Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis. In 1998, Iraq was under intensifying U.S. pressure, which culminated in a series of large air attacks in December.
Similar meetings between Iraqi officials and Bin Ladin or his aides may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some reported strains with the Taliban. According to the reporting,Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides’ hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States"

Amazing to me, how you Conservatives have truly convinced yourselves that we did nothing wrong. That the last several years were not full of mistakes and ****-ups on the part of your leadership. You are so far out of the mainstream on these opinions, it's not even funny.

cyclo wrote:

Amazing to me, how you Conservatives have truly convinced yourselves that we did nothing wrong. That the last several years were not full of mistakes and ****-ups on the part of your leadership. You are so far out of the mainstream on these opinions, it's not even funny.

I've never said that the Bush administration did nothing wrong. They screwed up royally, especially in failing to be as adequately prepared to "win the peace" as they were to "win the war". History is replete with examples of decisions correctly made at the time using the available facts at hand which proved wrong in hind-sight. The decision-making process that Bush went thru (using the facts he had then) is still valid and it's a vain and futile exercise to rethink that decision thru the lens of facts know today.

As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

This directly cuts against the argument, that Bush's crew took a sober look at the available evidence and came to the conclusion that, sadly, they had no choice but to attack Iraq. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the decision to attack Iraq was a political one, one which fulfilled long-term goals of the Neocons. And the disaster which ensued was a critical mistake for our country. I believe this is exactly what the 'history books' will show.

Cycloptichorn

No. The U.S. history books, that school children read, always make an ethical case for any actions the U.S. was involved in.

The history books that you talk about might be in a library, but you know how many people read library history books.